Comfort Food

As a mixed-race woman, Japanese food helps make me feel whole.

By
Mia Nakaji Monnier

Feb 8, 2018

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I’ve been chasing Japanese flavors lately: the sweetness of a matcha parfait shared with my mom, the mustard heat of hiyashi chuka, the clean nuttiness of mugicha, as Japanese as cypress wood. On days when I need comfort, nothing delivers it like this food, the food of my culture — the infinite combinations of soy and seaweed and rice.

I’ve been needing this kind of comfort more often lately — though I’m embarrassed to admit it. My life is easy. I have a good job, doing what I dreamed of doing as a kid. My parents are healthy. I’m healthy. Yet I can’t shake the nagging feeling, embedded under my skin, that something is wrong. Often I wake to find it there, this sense that I’m falling short in ways both concrete and not: I’ve failed to write the story I imagined, I’ve failed to clean my apartment, I’ve failed to feel good, despite my good life. At the new ice cream shop in my neighborhood, I order the Japanese neapolitan (stripes of matcha, goma, sakura) and eat it slowly, knowing that too soon it will be gone and I will be left with the same hunger.

When I try to explain this anxiety to others, it often feels indulgent and unfriendly. Its urgency belies a dull predictability, leading to the same revelations that somehow escape me again and again. It’s maddeningly nebulous, a mess of feelings and resolutions floating everywhere — and sometimes, a change of location or the taste of a certain flavor is the only way I know how to anchor myself. As a mixed-race woman, I’m particularly desperate for this anchor, for a moment to be still and whole and free from explaining myself to anyone.

I eat my feelings in the typical way, for that bloom of pleasure that briefly drowns the other noises in my brain. But with Japanese food, I’m also aware of rebuilding myself, nourishing something necessary and vulnerable that, increasingly, I have to sustain alone. I try the poke place down the street, where the Japanese owner, hearing that my mom is from Osaka, gives me a can of green tea and a scoop of fried onions. "I have to honor our blood," he says. In the restaurant’s courtyard, I scribble notes I hope I can hold long enough to turn into something more.

A year ago, while I visited her in another state, a close white friend of 10 years looked me in the eyes and called me a "dirty half-breed." It was a joke, maybe. Neither of us laughed. We’d been talking about a hybrid animal, a beefalo. Which one of my parents was supposed to be the cow in this scenario, I wondered, and which one the buffalo? Later, I Googled their images, looked into their brown eyes, and considered the possible permutations, as if my friend had left a meaningful clue in the metaphor.

The moment passed as soon as it came. I stayed at my friend’s house for the rest of the week as I’d planned, all but forgetting her words. And then, when she dropped me off at the Airbnb I’d booked myself for the next two nights, it all came rushing back at once. I remembered how, in college, when we’d just met, my friend had insulted my Japanese food until I’d stopped eating it around her, switching to cheese and crackers and bread with butter. Who can say no to carbs and dairy, anyway? I saved my Japanese food cravings for parties with my Asian friends. From places as far-flung as Singapore and Alaska and Hong Kong and New Hampshire, we improvised meals together with limited ingredients, my mini rice cooker the life of the party. Soon, this divided diet felt perfectly natural, my Japanese self reserved for places where it felt embraced, where it felt safe.

As I remembered this, I’d been wandering Whole Foods looking for snacks. Alone for the first time in a week, I chose the trail mix with sesame sticks, and when the South Asian cashier let me have them for free because the bar code was scratched, I wanted to hug him. That night, my Airbnb host, a Chinese-American guy named Peter, told me where to go for the best shrimp chips he’d ever had. They came free and refillable at the bar; crisp, oily, and quick to dissolve. They tasted like my childhood. I thought of the processed kind my relatives used to send from Los Angeles when we still lived in the Midwest. My brothers and I fought over them, eating as quickly as we could, our mouths and fingers smelling of shrimp essence and salt.

In those two days before returning home, I let myself chase comfort even when it felt corny, buying stationery at my favorite Japanese American-owned boutique, eating Japanese-French pastries, drinking a houjicha latte, having my nails painted a shade of raw tuna-red called Maki Me Happy. Meanwhile, I reached out to close friends and gratefully took their support. One told me about his favorite nearby sushi place, and I went there for dinner and ordered chirashi zushi. For the first time, I sat alone at the bar and chatted with the other people beside me. We talked about food and gentrification, and I spoke Japanese with the waiter, who was surprised but not too much to reply rapidfire with a smile. Every bite of the fresh local fish felt like a defiant triumph — a reclamation, a middle finger, a relief.

The high of newfound strength and community and identity lasted for a couple of months before those words — "dirty half-breed" — began coming back to me. I hear them now when I see cute mixed kids, when I edit essays about race, when I try to write an essay of my own. I think about my in-between identity — how I’m other enough to be called a "half-breed," and white enough for my offense to come as a surprise. At a lunch meeting, I order tekka maki, but it’s a pale imitation.

In therapy, I talk about these things: my anxiety, the beefalo incident, my writer’s block, eating. We talk about how to channel my nervous energy into constructive action. I can do it in bursts, write with abandon, eat in moderation. Then I slip again. I remember the soft Japanese cream puffs my mom eats in one bite, her smile guilty and bright with joy. My younger brothers have moved to another state and send us photos of their homemade curry in a group text. "Jozu," my mom replies, "Good job." No matter how many times my mom brings him a bento for dinner, my dad always says, "Is this for me? Thank you." I pour hot water onto rice and shiso, and watch the steam rise up. I take a bite. As long as the flavor lasts on my tongue, I have history, I have context. As long as the flavor lasts, I am not half — I am whole.

Mia Nakaji Monnier is a journalist and essay writer with work in The Boston Globe; BuzzFeed; O, The Oprah Magazine; and more. She is also co-editor of The Blend, a new vertical at HelloGiggles for first-person stories about multiracial and multicultural experiences.

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